ChuChu Rocket!

"And you thought Mickey's voice was annoying..."

Men and animals have always had a very troubled relationship. Sometimes friends, sometimes archenemies, it seems they can only collaborate to perform actions that benefit both parties. Yet, taking animals from their native wilderness and attempting to tame their natural instincts has never been a child’s play. As you’ll see later on, space mice are probably the hardest of all species to deal with: their stubborn character as well as their frustrating unpredictability can drive men crazy, but once domesticated they become extremely reliable friends. In a way, Chu Chu Rocket is the perfect illustration of this struggle between different species: it’s a story of hate, a story of love.

Words can hardly describe how shocking this puzzle game is. No really, Chu Chu Rocket isn’t for the feint of heart! The day I played this title for the first time will stay engraved in my memory for decades…

11/01/1999 – 5:21 pm – Some remote village in the mountains, France

In front of my brother’s skeptic eyes, I triumphantly pop the GD in my newly acquired Dreamcast with a large smile on my face. After the usual Sega and Sonic Team logos…

Oh the obsessive music with its four different notes! What on earth are these distasteful colors that hurt my eyes? And those weird things on the screen that keep moving like a bunch of high school kids on an acid trip? Please make it stop! I keep pressing various buttons, hoping to put a halt to this row: yes indeed, it seems to affect something, but I don’t quite understand what!

Soon after realizing that shouting ’what the hell is this?’ and cursing the damn mammals won’t make them shut up, I take a deep breath, swallow my pride and open the instruction manual.

A few minutes later, the fantastic world of Chu Chu Rocket opened its doors to me. You see, ChuChus aren’t ordinary mice. No, they’re space mice. And they’re dumber than Jim Carey. But poor little things, the space port where they used to live happily became invested with space cats, and it’s up to you to help them to escape by leading them to the closest rockets! Although my first impression of the ChuChus wasn’t exactly favorable (in other words, I didn’t give a damn about them), I decided to give them another chance. ‘I got the game for free anyway’, I cried defiantly.

Alas, the game wouldn’t give me a chance. Either CCR was particularly difficult, or I wasn’t able to grasp a concept as simple as ‘catch the mice, not the cats!’ and enjoy the game for what it was.

It wasn’t me.

The game isn’t easy, and despite Sega’s attempts to make the solo mode more exciting, it simply fails to keep the attention of the player. Although the challenges are interesting, they quickly become so hard that they’d give Kasparov a headache. In time, it appears Chu Chu Rocket is too fast for its own good, leaving the player frustrated and confused by his inability to imagine a coherent path in so little time.

Blaming the controls for all this mess would be nonsensical, though: as you’d expect from a puzzle game, they’re responsive and intuitive. The directional pad is used to move your cursor over the two-dimensional checkerboard while pressing the buttons will place arrow panels. All you have to do is use these panels to lead the mice to the rockets, naturally avoiding the infamous KapuKapus along the way. Contrary to the docile mice, these huge cats can quickly destroy your panels, forcing you to constantly stay alert and travel the screen to protect the stupid little things. Even though there are a variety of backgrounds, the developers apparently failed to either make Chu Chu Rocket more interesting or break its depressing monotony: it gets old extremely fast.

Still, Sonic Team definitely had a brilliant idea when they made the decision to implement puzzles using the engine of the main game: more entertaining and less confusing than the main game, they’re particularly addictive and thought provoking. Although literally copied and pasted from the inspirational Lemmings, the concept of setting “traps” to modify the path of the sprites still works and is more challenging than most recent adventure games.

Abysmal work from a talented development team

Ugly: the word that describes Chu Chu Rocket’s graphics the best. Terrible, uninspired and dull all tie for runner-up. The outrageous lack of depth of the backgrounds and the simplistic animation of the sprites are not even worthy of being discussed. Worse yet, there are only two of the latter! I refuse to believe that there was no way to make this game look better than a Master System title with such a powerful system.

As mentioned before, the music is infinitely annoying but it has the merits of perfectly fitting the game’s theme. Music doesn’t get much more obsessive than that, but then again, it’s an aspect shared by many puzzle classics out there. Who has forgotten Tetris’ Russian tune? Predictably, the sound effects are insipid, ranging from mediocre to asinine. Chu Chu Rocket is a nightmare for your ears.

’Noooooo… Please let me play GTA3…’

Apart from its shameful visuals and its awful soundtrack, CCR has no critical flaw, but it’s not a revolutionary game either, as one can easily point out where it takes its inspiration. Useless for the unsociable except for the puzzle mode, it becomes a decent game when played against other humans. But even then, the omnipresent sense of confusion is often enough to annihilate the players’ enthusiasm. What a pain.

Sadly, the announced death of the online mode –in which you could humiliate and then be insulted by people you don’t know- certainly detracts from the game since it’s not at the level of Tetris and consorts. Even if you can find three humans with an abnormal interest for space mice, the odds are you’ll get crazy after just a few hours. Even for a free game, it’s disappointing. On the other hand, Chu Chu Rocket is perfect as a torture instrument. Just ask my little brother.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/01, Updated 02/02/03